I appreciate a good cup of coffee, especially a cappuccino or espresso (please don’t say expresso, especially in a good Italian restaurant). That’s why I have refused to drink Amtrak coffee, which is like ingesting lube oil—until now.
Ah, to be a public servant fulfilling the boast of Caesar Augustus: “I found Rome a city of bricks and left it a city of marble.” For the incoming Federal Railroad Administrator, it is best to check ego at the door and accept the pithy guidance of Charles Dickens:
As United Airlines is learning, the grabbing by the arms of a fare-paying, law-abiding 69-year-old passenger, and forcibly dragging him through the aisle for removal from an aircraft for no reason other than United having overbooked the Chicago-Louisville flight and wishing to put a more favored fanny in the seat, is a public relations nightmare—and not to be treated as any less offensive than the preferred method of body-part grabbing by the current President of the United States.
The Mexicans are coming. The Mexicans are coming—and within verbal-indignities-hurling distance of President Donald J. Trump’s Palm Beach, Fla., Mar-a-Lago “Winter White House.”
I have stressed many times in this blog, and in my monthly magazine columns—at times in harsh terms that may have offended some people who, for reasons I can’t quite figure out, took my remarks personally—that the Trump Administration’s extremely nationalistic ideology, if it morphs into law, will critically injure the railroads and the railroad supply community.
What has been will be again; what has been done will be done again. There is nothing new under the sun. Is there anything of which one can say, “Look! This is something new”? It was here already, long ago; it was here before our time. No one remembers the former generations, and even those yet to come will not be remembered by those who follow them. Ecclesiastes 1: 9-14.
One of Keith Creel’s first acts upon becoming Canadian Pacific CEO in February was a call to his counterpart at the union representing the railway’s train and engine (T&E) crews. It was time, CP’s top brass hat told the Teamsters senior rail boss, to restore respect and fairness to the railroad’s treatment of its engineers and conductors.
Two months into the Trump Administration, the Washington Post says his nomination process, leading to Senate confirmation, is moving more slowly than any in history. The New York Times describes “dust piling up in key offices … critical power centers in [Trump’s] government devoid of leadership.”
With collective bargaining between 13 labor unions and the nation’s Class I freight railroads (plus some regionals and short lines) over wages, benefits and work rules in its third fitful year, the National Mediation Board (NMB) could declare an impasse as early as late 2017.
Late last year, the Federal Railroad Administration announced that safety fines in 2016 were the highest in agency’s 50-year history, surpassing the previous record-breaking year in 2015 and suggesting the ever-increasing safety successes enjoyed by our industry could be tied to such punitive measures.